I’m trying out the new wp for iPhone by writing this using it, and including an iPhone self-portrait 😉
Category: communication
Newspapers and Web Design
We are living in confusing times because we are living through the biggest change in human communications since the printing press, maybe the biggest change ever. You can see this in the small changes that happen as we leave an old technology for a new. It is clear that newspapers and magazines, even tv, are challenged by the web. (Some tv shows are becoming almost loss leaders for the web. At the end of every news show, watchers are invited to see more information, visuals, and details on the show’s website.)
Today, in Stephen Downes newsletter, OLDaily, he references the newly designed website of the NY Times.
The table of contents on the left is clear and easy to read, and each of the story teasers links directly to the story.
Most other papers have sites that aren’t nearly as easy for users to sort through and read. They are still using layout similar to the paper layout. The New York Times have produced a game-changing news site design; it is no longer a website emulating the newsPAPER. It is a news website that will appeal to readers who aren’t going to the newspaper website as an adjunct to the paper. It is a news site design that those who haven’t grown up reading newspapers will gravitate toward. I think it is one of the small changes that lets go of the legacy format, and truly adapts to the new medium. I wonder what McLuhan would say!
Now the next question is how they will monitize it.
Check out this link too – http://www.megantaylor.org/wordpress/2009/02/18/first-look-at-a-new-news-interface/
News & Celebrity Now
Will Richardson describes the way news is currently collected:
from his blog – http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/the-news-according-to-twitter/
Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody says journalism is losing ground as a profession, as it becomes an activity that anyone can practise, and this demonstrates his point.
About Gaming – & Learning
If it’s this big …
the education community should be taking notice!
I confess I know almost nothing about gaming, but I suspect it will be (should be) deeply important to education. As a student, I used historical fiction to help me learn history, and it worked. The learning promise for gaming appears to be much richer and deeper.
This slideshow by Jerome Sudan (found via Stephen Downes) outlines the power of gaming quite succinctly.
The only “game” that I play regularly is the beyond simple iPhone widget Blanks – and I’m amazed at how seductive the experience is, (although occasionally I find their match-ups of definitions and words too obvious and/or grammatically different – but even that is fun). In Blanks, you are given a definition and four possible words. You are supposed to drag the matching word to a a ripped hole in the “lined paper” background. I suspect much rote learning of definitions – of language, parts of systems, geography, etc. would be much more efficiently taught (and learned) by having students play simple games where they drag one part to its match-up connection, thus adding a kinesthetic componant to immediate feedback and repetition. Movement on the screen and the privacy of “correction” are also part of the power of such simple games.
Do you know of any online effective educational games? (Preferably free ;-> )
From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able by Wesch
Michael Wesch is a pedagogical hero of mine. I’ve watched videos his classes made; I’ve watched a video of him explaining his teaching, and I asked a question on Twitter, and even though he doesn’t follow me, got an anwser from him within a few hours! He understands the impact of the new communication ecosphere we swim in, applies his understanding to his teaching, and can explain clearly why this is urgently central to education.
Here is a link to my highlighted copy of his recent Academic Commons article – From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able which I discovered via Stephen Downes. Indeed, as Wesch says, you set up your network and information comes to you.
Gladwell’s Outliers
I’m a fan. I admire Gladwell’s reader-friendly structure and prose, his style. I am intrigued by his unusual take on things that are both below the surface of what is (allowed to be) conscious and yet are common sense, once you’ve read the narratives and the research references and explanations. So I enjoyed reading Outliers, just as I was delighted by Blink and Tipping Point. Gladwell is a communicator who makes me think.
I especially like Outliers because it is so Canadian – it is Gladwell’s explanation of his own success, a statement that is both humble and proud. It is typically Canadian to be reticent in an obvious way, expecting others to make the connections. Gladwell started Outliers, his book about success, with a Canadian hockey story, included the impact of culture, and ended with his grandmother’s success, (which is part of the web that allowed his). All books are ultimately about their author’s and this one shows both that Gladwell knows he has done well, but he is clear that he also knows how lucky he has been in his timing and his community. He knows and demonstrates that community, culture, is the foundation for success – more than/ instead of – rugged individualism.
I have read some criticism of Gladwell’s success, much of it saying he’s not smart enough, his books are too “thin”. What I see is a wise educator, someone who understands the power of narrative as a base to set information in so readers will be able to recall it. I like popularists; I see them as educators and change-agents.
I also find Gladwell’s prose exceptionally easy to follow. People who structure easy-to-follow ideas and information are not asking their readers to do the author’s work. Authors who write easy-to-read sentences are skilled rhetoricians who understand their audiences. Many people appear to believe that “difficult-to-read” equals “deep”; I don’t. I admire Gladwell’s ability to compose material and write well.
I recommend Gladwell’s books, Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point.
Higher Education’s Survival
Sometimes you find someone saying what you have been thinking about. I think the future of higher education is in danger, and I would hate to see the loss of something so precious. Through Stephen Downes wonderful newsletter, OLDaily, which can be linked to here –Â http://www.downes.ca/, I found David Wiley’s 2008 ELearn presentation –Â http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/660 – which I’m embedding below. Serious food for thought
Kluging: An LMS Alternative
I confess I’m ambivalent about Learning Management Systems such as WebCT ad Desire2Learn. (I’m not at all ambivalent about Content Management Systems, such as WordPress – I am an enthusiastic user.) The distinction is that an LMS is a container for class work –
Learning Management System is a broad term used for a wide range of systems that organize and provide access to online learning services for students, teachers, and administrators. … web.mit.edu/oki/learn/gloss.html
and a CMS is
used to edit your website by giving the user an interface where they can log in and make text, graphic or structural amends to then publish the new pages on the live website. … absolute-digital.co.uk/glossary.php
I’m ambivalent about LMSs because I learned to use the web in teaching using an early version of WebCT – it was a scaffold for my learning and, as such, I hold it in some affection. However, as a teacher of communication skills and arts, as someone fascinated by language, I continued to learn about what could be done on the web, even outside of the LMS. Both passion and a sense of (teacher) responsibility drove me.
Currently I avoid, as much as I can, LMSs. Instead I kluge together a loose collection of free web applications, (Eduspaces Community blog, PBwiki, Pageflakes, Audacity, a password-protected mark site, and whatever free file-hosting service my current students recommend.) It’s a bit more work than using a LMS but I believe this approach, the kluging together of a selection of free web services, is a richer and more productive teaching practice.
Instead of keeping my students within a walled (and very expensive for the institution) garden, I am requiring them to learn how to use sites that are easily available to them for their personal and professional purposes. I am helping them become more indenpendant and sophisticated users of the most profoundly new communication tool our species has ever seen. And I’m pulling/pushing them into being part of creating the evolving web culture.
Teaching Communication Now!
As a longtime communications teacher, I am fascinated by our changing communications media and platform. And when I’m teaching, no matter the direct subject I’m teaching, I never lose awareness of the changes our culture is going through, and the responsibility of teachers to help prepare our students for this new and rapidly evolving communications environment. They will be swimming in it for the rest of their professional and personal lives.
What is often unnoticed is that in just over a century we have gone from having one way of recording, putting marks on paper, to multiple ways of recording, all more viscerally immediate than text. Photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures all speak more directly to our senses and emotions than squiggles on paper – which our minds must translate into meaning before we can have our sense and emotional responses. It is easier to think critically when text is what we are ‘reading’ than it is when we see and hear less mediated (so to speak) representations of the world we live in. We are now living in what Ong called “secondary orality” and that is what our students have been growing up in, and to a certain extent, what we grew up in too.
I have never known a world without photographs, radio and records, movies and television. However, text was still the dominant medium, at least in my educational experiences, for most of my early schooling, and mass media ruled. I looked, listened and watched, but I could only critique; I couldn’t participate.
Now I can sit in my study and produce multimedia, as in this blog post.
Vodpod videos no longer available.The audio is poor, but understandable, and I’m combining text with video. I can embed other sites, like what I thought about this new multimedia platform that we can access using computers –
and I can link to other sites for readers/viewers who want to explore more of the educational possibilities – http://jnthweb.pbwiki.com/
and I can make movies using my screen –
Vodpod videos no longer available.
more about “Generating a Table of Figures in Word…”, posted with vodpod
There are other tools that I can use to create a mixed media text, and, here is the point I want to make:
We need to be teaching our students (technical and non-technical) how to compose using the expanding possibilities of the web as a multimedia, participatory communication platform!
Twitter – a Brief Intro
I’ve been ‘playing’ on Twitter for a few months now. I choose who I follow based on whether we appear to have similar interests, and I let anyone who wants to follow me. There are people who I follow who don’t follow me, and people who follow me who I don’t follow back. It makes for a kind of discontinuous ‘conversation’, and you might wonder why I bother. Here are some reasons:
- it can be interesting seeing what people are doing/thinking in different parts of the world;
- I find links to sites about things that interest me, mostly about the impact of social media on education and small businesses;
- I find blogs I want to add to my RSS reader;
- reading Tweets can take the boredom out of waiting.
If you’ve heard the buzz about Twitter but don’t ‘get’ it, here are two resources that might help you start, but you have to play on Twitter for at least a month to find out how you might want to use it, and if it’s useful for you.
CommonCraft’s Twitter in Plain English by Lee LeFever
Biz Stone’s How Do You Use Twitter, on Vimeo
The discipline of only having 140 character spaces helps you practice alternative phrasing, brevity, and, possibly, texting spellings. The availablity of Twitter on mobile devices allows you to do silly things like watch political debates while reading Tweets and writing them while the debate (or game or show) is still going on.
Personally I use a variety of Twitter applications:
- On my laptop
- http://twitter.com/home – the home site
- http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ – which allows me to see any Replys or Direct Messages even if I’ve missed them when they first showed up on Twitter
- There are many, many Twitter applications – use Google if you want to try some of the others.
- http://twitter.com/home – the home site
- On my iPhone
- Twitterific – which is free from the App Store
- Summizer – $2.99 from the App Store and allows you to search for topics and/or follow hashtags (Look it up;-> I had to).
So give Twitter a try, but do watch out; it can become addictive;->
Learning Living 